Ramayana’s AI Partner Said You’d Hear the Original Actors in English. The Director Says Dubbing Artists Voiced Every Line

Two weeks before Ramayana’s world premiere, the AI company behind its English version said audiences would hear the original actors’ voices in English. On the red carpet in Los Angeles, the director said every voice was recorded by dubbing artists and AI only moved the lips. For the voice actors who dub films for a living, that gap matters.

Ramayana: Rise of a Legend had its world premiere on 27 October at the David Geffen Theatre inside the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Before the screening, director Nitesh Tiwari took a question that had been following the film around social media for days: did AI dub it?

“As far as AI is concerned, it’s only being used to lip sync, so that we can present the film to the world in their language,” Tiwari told reporters, as quoted by Hindustan Times. “All the voices are dubbed by the artists. AI has only been used to get the lip movement right, so that the audience can enjoy it in their native language. No AI has been used in dubbing, voice is dubbed by real artists only, AI is being used to lip sync.”

He had reason to say it plainly. Film reviewer Parth Chaturvedi wrote on X: “Reports that some critics have cancelled their #Ramayana premiere screenings over the misconception that the film is AI-dubbed are deeply concerning.” He added: “The film has been dubbed by real artists. Brahma AI has been used only for lip-syncing, not for dubbing the dialogues.” The Hollywood Reporter India, which carried his post, said a few critics had dropped their premiere plans because they believed the voices were generated by AI.

Ranbir Kapoor plays Rama, Sai Pallavi plays Sita and Yash, who also co-produced the film, plays Ravana. Sony Pictures handles international distribution, and the first part opens in cinemas on 5 November, with paid previews the day before.

Image: Sony Pictures / Prime Focus Studios, official trailer artwork

What Brahma AI said two weeks earlier

The trouble is that the company doing the lip sync described its work differently. Brahma AI won a Technology and Engineering Emmy this month for AI-based face replacement and performance-preserving post-production transformation. Its founder and chief technology officer, Jo Plaete, spoke to the Belgian broadcaster VRT about the award.

“Next month, we’re releasing a major Indian film, ‘Ramayana’, in the United States. The film has been fully translated into English, but you can still hear the voices of the original actors and see their facial expressions,” Plaete told VRT NWS on 15 October. Earlier in the same interview he said the newest version of the technology can “make an actor speak in a different language, whilst retaining their own voice, facial expressions and articulation.”

A day later, the trade magazine TVBEurope reported that Ramayana “was shot in Hindi and will be released next month in English with the actors’ own voices,” and quoted Plaete on what that means for everyone else: “Apply that to any series and the dubbing pipeline changes shape.”

Plaete also told TVBEurope that Brahma AI’s “models are trained on licensed footage with the actor’s consent and deleted when the project ends,” and that the company sat in the SAG-AFTRA discussions on digital replicas. On jobs, he said: “I prefer displacement to replacement. The repetitive work goes. The people with the eye get more creative work than they had before.”

What the producer said in August

The filmmakers’ account hasn’t changed since the English trailer came out in August. Producer Namit Malhotra told NDTV, as reported by Bollywood Hungama on 6 August, that the team “hired a whole bunch of voice actors who really brought the nuance of performance in their voices,” and then “created our own bespoke technology, which helped stitch the lip movements of those performances on to the faces of the actors.”

VoiceEditSuitePerformance CoachA director's notes on every take.Scores and timestamped notes on every take.See how it works

A day later, MensXP and The Times of India named one of those voices. Mohan Kapur, known to Marvel audiences as Kamala Khan’s father in Ms. Marvel and The Marvels, voiced Yash’s Ravana in the English trailer. MensXP reported that several fans had assumed the deep voice belonged to Yash himself, which is roughly what good dubbing is supposed to achieve.

Even the trailer coverage didn’t fully agree. The Indian Express ran its 5 August trailer story under a headline saying Ranbir Kapoor voices Lord Rama in English. So the public record now holds three versions: hired voice actors, Ranbir Kapoor himself for Rama, and, according to the AI vendor, the original actors’ own voices carried into English.

Those can’t all describe the same soundtrack. Voice Over Herald hasn’t seen a statement from Brahma AI or Sony Pictures since the premiere that reconciles them, and the reviews embargo only lifts on Friday.

The product page dubbing actors should read

Brahma AI sells this kind of work as a product. Its voice tool, VAANI, is billed on the company’s own site as “Synthetic Voices. Authentic Emotions and Nuances.” The page reads: “Powered by advanced AI voice transformation and built on the ATMAN performance engine, VAANI enables any person to speak any language accurately, emotionally, and in perfect sync with facial expressions and lip movement.”

Brahma AI's VAANI page, as it appeared on 29 October 2026. Image: brahma.io

Nobody has said VAANI was used on Ramayana, and the page doesn’t mention the film. But it’s worth reading for what it offers buyers. Under the heading “Who benefits from VAANI?”, the pitch to creative production teams reads: “Produce multilingual content at scale while avoiding repeated casting, dubbing sessions, or reshoots.”

That line is the whole worry in one sentence. A lip-sync pass on top of a human dub keeps dubbing artists in the booth and makes their work look better on screen. A voice transformation pass that turns a dubbing artist’s read into the star’s voice keeps them in the booth too, but takes their voice off the finished film. The audience can’t tell which one happened, and right now neither can the people writing about it.

Forty languages is a lot of voices

The scale makes the question bigger. A trade source told Bollywood Hungama on 12 October that Ramayana “has been dubbed in nearly 40 languages,” calling it “the first time an Indian film has been dubbed on such a massive scale,” and said the full list would follow. The makers haven’t published that list yet, and the source didn’t say who voiced each version.

If those versions were all recorded by human casts, it’s one of the biggest dubbing jobs an Indian film has handed out, spread across dozens of countries. If some of them lean on voice transformation, the credits will be the only place a working dubbing actor can find out. Either way, Ramayana looks set to become the case producers point to when they pitch the next one.

What to ask before a lip-sync pass touches your work

None of this tells us who is right about Ramayana. It does give dubbing actors a short list of things worth getting in writing whenever a booking mentions AI lip sync or “visual localisation.”

The VAANI pitch to creative production teams, 29 October 2026. Image: brahma.io

First, credit: will your name appear on the version you voiced? Second, scope: is the AI pass limited to the actor’s mouth on screen, or can your recorded performance be fed through voice transformation so it sounds like someone else? Third, consent and training: Plaete himself says consent and deletion should be built in, so ask whether your recordings are used to train anything and when they’re deleted.

Those questions cost nothing to ask. On a film released in nearly 40 languages, the answers could be the difference between a credit and an invisible job.

Sources: Hindustan Times (Vibha Maru, 28 Oct 2026); The Hollywood Reporter India (28 Oct 2026, including Parth Chaturvedi’s post on X); ETV Bharat (28 Oct 2026); 123telugu (28 Oct 2026); VRT NWS (15 Oct 2026); TVBEurope (Jenny Priestley, Oct 2026); Bollywood Hungama (6 Aug and 12 Oct 2026); MensXP (7 Aug 2026); The Times of India (7 Aug 2026); The Indian Express (5 Aug 2026, headline); Brahma AI, VAANI product page (brahma.io/vaani, read 29 Oct 2026). Hero image: Prime Focus Studios, official English trailer artwork.

Lee este artículo en español: El socio de IA de Ramayana dijo que en inglés se oirían los actores originales. El director asegura que todas las voces son de actores de doblaje

Know something about this story, or spotted an error? Tell the newsroom.